Review: Kvinderegensen – A piece of history

K vinderegensen was founded in 1931 by Dr. Eli Møller, as the first Danish dorm for female university students. But you no longer have to be a woman to live in the Amager dorm; in fact, being male might just count in your favour.

»There are just a lot more girls on the waiting list than boys,« resident Anne Sofie Christensen tells me. This, along with the dorm’s requirement for equal numbers of each gender on every corridor, means women tend to spend a few years on the waiting list, whereas men only have to wait about a year.

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Greenhouse party and a one-day festival

At this dorm, not many demands are placed on residents, says another resident, Lasse Strand. »It really is a college where there is room for everyone.«

With only 56 rooms, there is hardly room for everyone, but if you are enrolled as a student at the University of Copenhagen and interested in staying at Kvinderegensen, simply hand in an application form in person and then wait patiently.

For the price of DKK 2,600 a month, you will get your own room and access to a shared kitchen, toilet, and bathroom as well as the newly landscaped garden. Here you will find a greenhouse, which may not house many plants, but which boasts many other features, as Anne Sofie Christensen points out:

»We recently had a party in the greenhouse and it gets really foggy in there when you get a dry ice machine going.«

The garden is also used for the dorm’s annual one-day festival, where music is played on a small stage erected for the purpose — the festival lineup must consist of 50 per cent women, of course.

Preserving the spirit of the dorm

The history of Kvinderegensen, or what the two residents call the ‘spirit of the dorm’, is tangible as you walk through the old building which, in addition to a popular bar in the basement, also houses a small library and a banquet hall, which can be rented by residents and alumni for special celebrations such as weddings.

»It’s fantastic to live in a place where you can feel that people have lived there before you,« says Anne Sofie Christensen. »There are so many little details you don’t see at first, but that you slowly start to notice.«

For example, the names of the original contributors are engraved above the doors of the various rooms, and in the kitchens, you can find old community books — the predecessor to today’s Facebook groups — which residents used over the years to leave small notes for each other or arrange community dinners.

However, there is one drawback to staying at Kvinderegensen, Anne Sofie Christensen explains: its location in between Amager Boulevard and the equally busy road Ved Stadsgraven.

»The only bad thing I have to say about the place is that once you’ve lived here, you never want to live between two major roads again.«

[This review has been written by a student reporter at the University Post. If you want to write an English-language review of your dorm write to uni-avis@adm.ku.dk and mark it ‘Dorms Disclosed’]

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